Equally creditable is the reiterated plea--from 1847 onward--for the establishment of International Copyright, to guard English authors from the piracy of American publishers, amongst whom Putnam is singled out as an honourable exception. It may be fairly claimed for _Punch_ that he made very few mistakes in appraising the merits of the authors of his time or of the rising stars. He failed to render justice to Disraeli as a writer, and he curtly dismissed Walt Whitman's _Leaves of Grass_ as "a mad book by an American rough." But literary values prove him substantially right in his distaste for the flamboyant exuberance of Bulwer Lytton, and absolutely sound in his castigation of the tripe-and-oniony flavour of Samuel Warren's books, one of which he held up to not undeserved obloquy under the ferocious misnomer of "The Diarrhoea of a Late Physician." He was a veritable _malleus stultorum_ in dealing alike with the futilities of incompetent aristocrats and the homely puerilities of Martin Tupper and Poet Close. The famous campaign against the poet Bunn and his bad librettos goaded the victim into reprisals in which he gave as good as he got, but the fact remains that Bunn _was_ a bad poet, though _Punch_ quite overdid his persecution. The nobility of Wordsworth, though the least humorous of poets, was handsomely acknowledged; when the erection of a statue to Peel was mooted, _Punch_ put in a claim for a similar honour to the sage of Rydal. And though indignant with Carlyle for his defence of slavery, _Punch_ was still ready to acknowledge "the monarch in his masquerade." Lastly, he not only welcomed Tennyson as a master, but threw open his columns to him to retort on his detractors. [Sidenote: _"Punch" and "The Times"_] [Illustration: JENKINS AT HOME] [Sidenote: _Victorian and Georgian Journalism_]